Six years since my PhD defense
It's been 6 years to the day since I received my PhD in Industrial Design from TU Eindhoven. What has happened since then?
It's a little bit funny that I've neen ranting about smart homes this past week, as that is exactly what I was working on at the time: Designing and building systems for smart home interoperability. Based on my recent experiences with setting up Hive Home, smart home interoperability is still an unsolved problem. I feel like the work described in my PhD thesis does solve a small part of the puzzle, but unfortunately the company who had the best chance of implementing the system we developed was Nokia, which you may recall was driven into the ground by Microsoft and their trojan horse takeover. What I can definitely tell you is that APIs are not the answer.
I haven't really looked much at smart home systems in the six years since, as I've been focusing my energy on medical devices. The first three years as a postdoc at Swansea University, looking at device safety in terms of their user interfaces. The most recent three years I've been working with Tidepool on liberating the data stored on medical devices, specifically those used for treating diabetes.